In this story:

• Automation streamlines the service provisioning process for new wholesale customers, allowing the business to grow exponentially
• Emerge increases their revenue by capturing previously unbilled data using Cumulus
• Emersion provides support for reporting and API connectivity on an hourly basis

Emerge Internet provides telco services from multiple Australian tier-one carriers, cherry-picked and packaged into solutions designed for SMBs. Founder Droyt Robb’s background in IT and telco means that he understands the pain points and goals of small businesses.

The company was founded in 2018 to address a gap in the business services and technologies market for Australian SMBs. At the time, the NBN was being rolled out and he saw a huge opportunity to come and fill the huge void at the small to medium end of the market.

In 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the services of Emerge were in high demand as SMBs were beefing up their communications technology. To scale their business to cope with this extra volume, Emerge knew they needed to automate as much of their business as possible. This was when they began to encounter significant holes in the functionality of their existing billing platform. To keep growing, Emerge needed to find a new billing platform capable of high-level automation and incoming customer growth.

“One of the features we liked about Emersion was that it’s built as an automation platform foremost, and one of the functions it can do is billing. Rather than a billing platform with automation tools as an afterthought.”

Droyt Robb – Founder – Emerge Internet

Emerge actually considered building their own billing and automation platform but found that the flexibility of white labelling and integration offered by Emersion was a critical part of the customer experience they wanted to deliver.

“By selling the Emersion platform as white-labelled underneath us, it gives smaller guys an entry level point that’s probably a lot cheaper than they’d normally get if they’re just selling our products and services.”

Droyt Robb – Founder – Emerge Internet

Why Emerge Internet chose Emersion as their billing automation platform of choice.

Automation streamlines the service provisioning process for new wholesale customers, allowing the business to grow exponentially

With Emersion, Emerge was able to completely automate the service provisioning process. New customers can now sign up, log in, submit their orders and receive services automatically, and receive notifications via email and SMS along the way to confirm service delivery. Emerge is able to track this process via their provisioning logs and dashboards provided by the Emersion platform.

“One of the plans we wanted was… wholesale clients to be able to log in and provision and manage services themselves from the start without any human interaction from Emerge or Emerge staff at all.”

Droyt Robb – Founder – Emerge Internet

Making these changes to their business, which Droyt describes as a huge leap forward, has allowed Emerge to capture the increased demand and grow their business exponentially. Emerge averages 12-15% growth month-on-month, a rate which they have impressively maintained for the past three years.

In addition to extremely strong growth, automation has allowed Emerge to completely phase out their use of overseas staff and keep their entire team based in Australia.

“This was important for us in another way. We wanted to show that all the staff we had are 100% Australian, no overseas support or call centres. Now with the automation we’ve been able to move those and get rid of that back-of-house overseas. We can now genuinely say that we are 100% Australian-staffed, with no overseas staff at all.”

Droyt Robb – Founder – Emerge Internet

How Emersion’s automation features allowed Emerge’s business to scale exponentially.

Increasing revenue by capturing previously unbilled data using Cumulus

During the migration from their previous billing platform over to Cumulus, Emersion’s business and billing automation platform, Emerge was surprised to see how much data was being missed on their old systems. This was data which could have been billed out to customers. Using Cumulus has allowed the business to capture this previously missed data and earn revenue from it, as they should have for a potentially long time.

“We’re able to pick up that information now and build connectors quite quickly and easily to make sure that we’re actually billing out everything that we should be. Every dollar rather than missing out on a few hundred dollars here and there. It suddenly adds up when you get larger, and you move from hundreds of services to thousands of services. A few dollars here and there makes a significant difference.”

Droyt Robb – Founder – Emerge Internet

Emerge reports that the extra data that they’re able to bill on when using Cumulus is making a huge contribution to their revenue. Droyt says that between 5-10% of their total revenue month-to-month is now coming from previously unbilled data.

“It’s pretty significant when you realise the slim margins you have in telco. 15% is a high margin in telco. So to find out you get an extra 5% revenue that you’ve not been billing out when you could have been, it has a big impact.”

Droyt Robb – Founder – Emerge Internet

How Emerge used Emersion to captured additional billing data which now accounts for 5-10% of their revenue.

Emersion provides support for reporting and API connectivity on an hourly basis

Fitting Emersion into the complex stack of technologies used by a company like Emerge is a task made much easier by the versatile connectivity of Cumulus and the custom development offered by the Emersion development team. Cumulus natively integrates with over 100 vendor partners, and has automated over 750 service types for various customers of Emersion.

“We approached Emersion and said we need reporting for X, we need API connectivity to be able to do Y. They’ve been quite willing to chop and change and add features and functions and rewrite certain API modules and things to make it fit for us as well. That’s been a huge thing for us.”

Droyt Robb – Founder – Emerge Internet

Emerge now has a strong, ongoing relationship with Emersion. Their team meets with Emersion on a weekly basis to check in, discuss tickets and receive ongoing support for their fast-growing automated business. Droyt says that receiving this kind of customer support has been a game changer for Emerge.

“Support was very good, very responsive, generally most things are fixed within hours to a day, even if it’s strange API oddities and things like that. With Emersion they’re generally going to either patch or update it and fix it within a day or resolve it within hours.”

Droyt Robb – Founder – Emerge Internet

How we’ve worked closely with Emerge to ensure that they get the best possible results from using our billing automation platform.

Looking to foster exponential growth in your business using the power of automation?

Let’s chat. Get in contact with our sales team at Emersion today.